Monday, January 09, 2012

Back at work

I came in to the office this morning. (I do think I have a very minor version of what my dad and brother had: I have a scratchy throat, am sneezing a bit, and had a tiny bit of a fever last night. I don't think this is just allergies. But I'm not THAT sick, so I came in*.)

I'm the only one here right now. Offices are technically open but classes do not start until Wednesday.

(*When I was a kid, my mom's rules were that you either had to have a fever or be throwing up in order to be sick enough to stay home. (Or, I suppose, have something like open chicken pox sores). She didn't have to apply those rules as much with me, at least once I passed the age of 7 or so, because I was more likely to be "NOOOO! There's a test today! I can't miss school!")

I guess I'm still in decluttering mindset because my first order of business was to grab the several large boxes of paper "to be recycled" (they encourage us to recycle, but it's not super-convenient to do so) and stuck them on a cart, with plans of transferring them to my car and driving them to the recycling center south of town. Well, if it's not raining when I leave for the day, I will.

No evaluations as yet (that was what I was kind of dreading; even though my numbers have been good and I'm a Tenured Full Professor, I still hate reading the critical comments - some because I smack my forehead and go, "Why didn't they ask me to do that/not to do that during the semester when it could have helped?" and some because a lot of 20-somethings have not yet learned that "sucked" is not a part of constructive criticism.)

I did get one letter, re-approving me as Graduate Faculty for the next three years. (You have to show evidence of teaching graduate-level classes and also scholarly productivity for this. Not everyone applies for it but you have to, if you want to have graduate students). I had even forgotten I had done that - I think it was last spring I had to send the materials in. (The letter was dated Dec. 12; it must have come a day or two after I left).

So, now it's time to look over my notes and PowerPoints (Yes, I use 'em, even though the current pedagogical trend is to treat them as anathema. Well, when you work in an image-heavy field like Soils or a field where there are lots of graphs and charts and maps (like Ecology), it's really nice to be able to throw an image up on the screen and go, "Okay....come up with some hypotheses to explain this geographic distribution" or something like that. Also, I like having the important terms in typeface, because my handwriting isn't so hot, and because the university supplied us with grey chalkboards. Yeah, grey chalkboards. The only color of chalk that shows up reasonably well is yellow, or that big Crayola sidewalk chalk stuff...)

2 comments:

Chris Laning said...

I've experienced that mindset about coming in when you're sick, and I think I prefer my current work place's attitude of "Stay home and get well and don't spread your germs all over US!"

Chris Laning said...

It is too bad if pedagogy has decreed that ALL PowerPoints are bad. There are good PPs and terrible PPs. The terrible ones just put up all your bullet points and nothing else. I too am in a field where I have to SHOW people what I'm talking about, so they can say (in my case) "Oh, you mean THAT painting. No, I never noticed that detail before!"